This is just the new green line extension, which for a brand new multi-billion dollar line extension, is bad enough.
Take the Red Line? You might be seeing 56-88 minutes of delays (compared to years ago) compared to years prior, per data published by Transit Matters (https://dashboard.transitmatters.org/red/). Long distance trips (as in, much of the entire line) that took 40 minutes taking more than twice as long now.
In 2019 a train derailed taking out a signal house (https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2019/09/16/red-line-dera...). Per the TransitMatters chart, immediately after the derailment the average delays were about a half hour, but it’s since grown to twice to triple that!
The result is Red Line service is now under 60% of pre-pandemic service levels, with only about 45-50% of its previous ridership. (https://recovery.transitmatters.org/)
"Operated as Line 11 of the Moscow Metro, the BCL has a total length of 70km and is 13km longer than Line 10 in Beijing. Line 11 now serves a total of 31 stations"
Similarly, Paris is building 200km+ of new fully automated, fully grade separated, mostly underground metro covering the Paris metro area, and using the opportunity for urban redevelopment as well:
Yep, it's going to be amazingly useful when it comes out (first sections are scheduled for 2025, sadly too late for the 2024 Olympics) and a ton of very good developments are happening around the new stations.
Toronto will be opening 2 LRT lines this year/early next year. Works has also started on 1 new subway line, and a new subway extension. GO train expansion also continues with more service into and out of the city.
Montreal just opened the southern portion of the REM, a new automated train line, and work is well on its way to being done for the multiple branches it will have north of the currently open section.
Canadian cities (van, mtl, tor), despite not being “great”, do punch above their class in transit right now. (North America x population x wealth)
Don’t forget India. It’s putting massive metros in all its major cities and connecting them with semi-high speed medium and long distance trains as well at a crazy pace. All indigenously built.
The MBTA is a joke at this point and it is going to hurt the city.
Parts of the red line run horribly slow due to signaling issues (no idea when that is being fixed). Those same parts are shut down on weekends and after 9pm (something like that, I don't know the exact time) and replaced with shuttles.
The green line extension has been great when it worked but its been a mess.
Taking the green line and being stranded in a tunnel with no updates. Eventually multiple if us just got off and took Lyfts to where we were going.
The new trains had multiple issues. The Fires and I am sure plenty of other things I am forgetting about.
I made a conscious choice to not own a car but I am finding myself spending more and more on taking Lyfts because it just isn't reliable. Then traffic gets worse and it is just a really bad situation.
I used to live in Boston and visited recently for the first time in a while. The red line was so slow between Central Square and Harvard that I thought there must have been some kind of mechanical failure, but when I mentioned it to friends afterwards they said that it had been like that for months.
Really makes you wonder if they have a point about elite overproduction. Greater Boston has 70+ colleges and a very highly educated population, arguably the most well-educated among all large metros in the country[0]; yet with a budget of half a billion dollars per mile, they ended up with something broken, with something as fundamental as the track gauge!
The chief thing to understand about the MBTA (and many other things about metro Boston), is it's a patronage system at heart. Jobs to friends, and jobs to allies. That's it. Stripping the system and the public in order to pay for nice homes on the Cape, and to pay for nice retirements in NH and Maine.
MBTA administration is day camp for the adult children of Boston Brahmins. The operations department, OTOH, is full of the hardest working and most passionate people you’ll ever meet.
Naturally, those operations jobs tend to attract more transit riders and lovers, who are disproportionately POCs, low income, or disabled. But the working conditions are abusive and exploitative - especially for anyone who cares enough to speak up about the dysfunction. Check out the FTC’s report on dispatcher shift lengths, for example. Or TransitCenter’s report on obstacles to operations hiring.
The T can’t hire bus drivers, even with a $7k signing bonus, a massive ad campaign, and a recession. It’s worth asking why.
If the T ever improves, it will be because the people who rely on it are in charge. But your assessment is bang on. Given how much power those in charge have amassed, I don’t see it happening.
The MBTA is a disgrace and shows the incredible level of corruption in Massachusetts. Half of all rail accidents are due to the MBTA and over 90% of all injuries.
Workers routinely fake results. Corporations fake work. The MBTA and more broadly MA infrastructure is falling apart. I've never lived in a state with such disastrously bad drivers and roads. Oh and the police refuse to enforce traffic laws here (the state tried to literally pay our city to ask the police to enforce traffic laws and they refused so we had to return the money; sitting around construction sites doing nothing is easier).
Our city tried to sue one of the DoT contractors that damaged city infrastructure and caused many safety violations. DoT stepped in behind our back at a closed meeting the city wasn't allowed to attend and gave the contractor a special exemption that cleared their record and made them immune. Even though the law says they shouldn't be allowed to get new contracts for several years after such shoddy work.
Boston public transport is a mess due to long years of underfunding and neglect. The pandemic and the general crappiness of service has hit rider numbers hard and I fear that the Boston subway system is in a death spiral. The new line extension was a rare bit of good news and a welcome addition but having badly laid track is all to common here.
I actually rode the tracks in question last month and remarked how smooth they seemed compared to the rest of the green line. I guess that was too good to last.
I'm not sure how much more funding it could possibly get? Even before the pandemic, the T was only pulling in roughly a third of its operating expenses in revenue[0], meaning the other two thirds was paid for by other sources. Notably, operating income wasn't even enough to pay wages and benefits for MBTA employees.
The majority of those "other sources" was transfers from the state sales tax[1], meaning people living in Worcester, Springfield, Pittsfield, and Chatham were contributing to a system they don't use. Since the pandemic, public transit systems all across the country took a huge hit in ridership, and received federal funding as well, so now you have people living in California, Kansas, and Mississippi all chipping in, too.
Now I understand that taxation provides for the common welfare, and everyone subsidizes everybody else at some point, but with Greater Boston having the fifth-highest per capita income of all metros[2], I find it a little strange that the T requires such a great subsidy.
> the T was only pulling in roughly a third of its operating expenses in revenue
This is not a great argument, in that public transit is a public good and should not be expected to fully pay for itself. Public transit enables other economic behavior. Similarly, we don't expect roads to pay for themselves -- they're a public utility that enables other revenue producing behavior.
> people living in Worcester, Springfield, Pittsfield, and Chatham were contributing to a system they don't use
I don't have children but I'm happy to pay taxes that support public schools because I reap the benefits of an educated populace.
Boston produces the plurality of state revenue[0], far more than Worcester, Springfield, Pittsfield, or Chatham. The residents of those towns are happy to take revenue generated in and by Boston to pay for their services, but consistently vote against properly funding the T. Which is shortsighted, because cities with public transportation produce $1.5B more revenue per year[1], meaning those cities would have _lower_ taxes if they supported the T.
> I don't have children but I'm happy to pay taxes that support public schools because I reap the benefits of an educated populace.
This is actually a pretty apt comparison, since the original article of the thread was about the dysfunction of the Green Line Extension. Suppose you lived in Baltimore, where zero students passed grade-level math proficiency in 40% of public schools, and yet the school system CEO is paid half a million dollars a year. Would you be as keen on paying those taxes? After all, you really aren't getting the benefits of an educated populace in that case.
If the T cost a lot of money and provided great service, we wouldn't be having this discussion. It's the fact that it costs a lot of money and is still bad, and the proposed solution is yet more public funding for it, which is generating the discussion.
Taxes are included in fuel price at the pump, and some States are finally beginning to charge EV owners for road usage. States around east coast collect ~50 cents per gallon. It's wasted funding and lack of accountability, not lack of funding that roads are not better maintained.
Gas taxes pay for less than half of what's required for road maintenance[0].
Again, we don't expect roads to make a profit, but somehow mass transit has to play by other rules.
Cars are far, far more subsidized than public transit[1]. (Even these analyses tend to ignore externalities like "free" parking. In what other realm would you ever expect to permanently store your private property on public land without paying and have it protected by the police?)
Driving is so incredibly heavily subsidized in the US that people genuinely _believe_ things like paying a miniscule tax at the pump covers the actual cost of driving.
Your Bloomberg source reports that as of 2011, users of highways paid for 40-50% of the money spent on highways. The T's fare recovery ratio (the ratio of operating revenue to operating expenses) was in the low 40% range in the years up to 2019, the last normal year for transit systems. So it would appear that the amount of "subsidization" is comparable between road and transit.
I certainly don't expect mass transit to make a profit, either, to be clear. I understand the concept of a public good that generates positive externalities. But I don't want anything, whether it be cars or transit, to be a categorical imperative that must be enabled at any cost, since we live in a world constrained by limited resources.
Your second source puts up some figures from another source that says driving is effectively subsidized 10x, but unfortunately that source's website no longer functions, so I cannot evaluate what their methodology is. Regardless, it's obvious that automobiles are less efficient at moving people than mass transit. Perhaps a little less obvious is that efficiency isn't the end-all be-all goal of public policy.
The more interesting point it raises is the question:
> "What kind of place do you really want to live in?" with all factors considered.
With all factors considered, the greatest internal migration of the past few decades has been the post-Covid outflow of people from the few cities with transit systems that exist in the US to much more sprawling, car-dependent, suburban places.
The Blomberg link you provided was a useful read because it highlights how tax thinking is partisan. For example, "You might think both would pay the same sales tax ... while the driver would pay an additional gas tax, with that money going toward roads. In 37 states you'd be wrong—that's how many places have a fuel exemption for sales tax."
No, I would not think fuel should have two sales taxes.
The article concludes by advocating for fuel taxes to be added to the general fund instead of being siloed for roads. That sounds like a great way to take what is a specific use tax and spend it on everything, instead of the thing being used.
If you propose raising the fuel tax, well maybe that is needed.
Also, please help me understand where I have access to free parking on public land. Cettainly not at the airport or downtown streets in large cities.
> Also, please help me understand where I have access to free parking on public land. Cettainly not at the airport or downtown streets in large cities.
... Are you seriously trying to claim that you've never seen free street parking anywhere? The vast majority of parking everywhere in the country is unmetered. That's tax money paying for car storage. Cherry picking an airport is absolutely disingenuous and a bad faith argument.
Picking the airport and downtown are the only places on government property I occasionally park, and I pay per use for those. I rarely park on small roads because I have nothing to do there.
Roads can be private - owned by the person with the adjoining house. I live in a town in which the "roads" are private property with reciprocal easements to all other property owners in the town. It's awesome. There are no problems from people storing their RVs and trailers and junk on the street, because it gets towed for trespass. The town top budget item for our taxes is to hire companies to maintain what appear to be roads. This keeps the town answering to the people, because if they don't maintain the "roads" the people will reduce the taxes to about zero.
I'm serious, on what government property do I park for free?
Maybe govt owning transport infrastructure is not working or is not affordable. We grow up with what is around us, and that is what we know.
The Walmart parking lot is private and not paid by my taxes. There are solutions other than govt ownership, and some lead to more private property with allowances for public use.
If a coffee shop wants parking, maybe they should have their own parking spots rather than relying on govt to pave and maintain the parking spots on the street in front of the coffee shop.
You are not everyone in the country; indeed, you are a minority in that respect. Refuting a general argument through anecdote is not fair to what you’re discussing.
The funding for the T has to come from the state due to how it's structured, meaning the only possible way for funding to increase is for it to come out of the state budget. I agree that it should be handled at a city/local level.
This is, in fact, a huge part of the problem with the T. A the majority of people that benefit from it -- those outside of Boston who get the gains of its economic benefit without being dependent on it for transit -- are in a position to defund it. It's a microscopic repeat of the US as a whole, where the geographically larger but empty regressive areas can reap the benefits of the more concentrated and productive areas while simultaneously contributing far less but convincing themselves that they're somehow being victimized.
Without Boston, Massachusetts would be significantly poorer. But without the rest of Massachusetts, Boston would be significantly richer.
...but the actual oldest subway line in the world (between Paddington and Farringdon in London) works great. Recently got CBTC enabled so can handle 32tph (though doesn't actually run at that, though the not much newer southern half of the circle line does).
I'm not sure I follow. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Green Line (all of it, old and the Extension) use standard gauge tracks. The current problem with the Extension is that the brand new tracks are unstable and the parallel rails are collapsing into each other ("narrowing"). So it has nothing to do with the age of the rest of the system or the carriages, and everything to do with shoddy construction.
fair enough. what i was getting at was that even well made new construction inherits many constraints from the rest of the line, though it does ease others.
Buses are usually the cheaper inferior option. While bus service doesn't inherently suck, the type of decision making that chooses buses to minimize cost will usually cost optimize every portion of a bus network until the experience suffers. Dedicated lanes are not provided so buses get stuck in traffic. Bus stops without rain shelters or even a bench (versus full stations). Operating budgets get cut and then the interval between buses goes to 30 min. Service after 10 p.m. gets cut.
The bus networks that don't suck are usually called "shuttles" and are underwritten by tourism districts, airports, and theme park operators.
There’s a huge difference between good and bad metro lines. Just like how there’s a difference between good and bad bus systems.
Frequent and reliable metro with good coverage will beat bus system because of predictability. Also, capacity wise it’s much more effective, faster and etc. Unfortunately, most of North America’s systems are not of this type.
Flexible capacity = attempts at over optimization = not trusting that capacity will be there = unpredictable.
Shared infrastructure with roads and following road laws = all the inconvenience of traffic jams.
Flexible routes may be nice on a multi-year timetable but still runs into the jam issues above.
So if we are going to build dedicated lanes with special signal crossings and high capacity to encourage a large population to use it, let's make it as efficient as possible - a rail track is much more efficient than tires, and electricity is better than directly burning fuel, and delivering electricity through rail is better than battery.
Bus rapid transit exists, is much cheaper than rail, solves nearly all these problems while making the infrastructure far cheaper (due to ability to climb grade, etc). They’re often lighter than trains, they can be much more granular (so you don’t need an entire train at low rider volumes), so the efficiency can be closer to a wash than people would like. Especially with trolley buses or battery electric buses (or BEST, the combination ones).
It’s not an either/or situation. You have a bunch of tools with pros and cons and you have to use the proper tool where each one is most appropriate.
The best transportation systems are a blend of transportation types. Use rail where the benefits are worth the cost and buses where they are not. There also many incremental options in between.
Buses can only hope to match the reliability and headway of metro services if they have dedicated right of way and signal priority for the complete route. This eliminates several of your supposed benefits.
Take the Red Line? You might be seeing 56-88 minutes of delays (compared to years ago) compared to years prior, per data published by Transit Matters (https://dashboard.transitmatters.org/red/). Long distance trips (as in, much of the entire line) that took 40 minutes taking more than twice as long now.
In 2019 a train derailed taking out a signal house (https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2019/09/16/red-line-dera...). Per the TransitMatters chart, immediately after the derailment the average delays were about a half hour, but it’s since grown to twice to triple that!
The result is Red Line service is now under 60% of pre-pandemic service levels, with only about 45-50% of its previous ridership. (https://recovery.transitmatters.org/)